25. Reversing Diabetes Starts With Ignoring The Guidelines!

Here’s a transcript of a video I watched ages ago of Dr. Sarah Hallberg about her work helping people with obesity or diabetes, using a LCHF DIET. It had a great influence on me to keep on persevering to learn and adopt the LCHF LIFESTYLE. I’m hoping it will benefit many others as well by me posting and sharing this transcript. It is estimated that her TEDx talk got more views – over 340,000 – than any other talk from the same venue.

Dr Sarah Hallberg: Part 1
I have the best job in the world. I’m a doctor. No! Believe me that’s not why. I’m an obesity doctor. I have the honor of working with the group of people subject to the last widely accepted prejudice: being fat. These people have suffered a lot by the time they see me: shame, guilt, blame and outright discrimination.
The attitude that many take, including those in healthcare, is that these people are to blame for their situation. If they could just control themselves, they wouldn’t be overweight, and they are not motivated to change.
Please let me tell you this is not the case. The blame, if we’ve got to extend some here, has been with our advice. And it’s time we change that. Obesity is a disease, it’s not something created by lack of character. It’s a hormonal disease, and there are many hormones involved. And one of the main ones is a hormone called insulin. Most obese individuals are resistant to this hormone, insulin.
So, what does that mean exactly, to be resistant to insulin? Well, insulin resistance is essentially a state of pre-pre-type 2 diabetes. Insulin’s job is to drive glucose, or blood sugar, into the cells where it can be used. In a nutshell, when someone is insulin resistant, they are having trouble getting blood sugar where it needs to go, into those cells. And it just can’t hang out in the blood after we eat or we would all have a diabetic crisis after every meal.
So, when someone is resistant to insulin, the body’s response to this is to just make more of it. And insulin levels will rise and rise, and for a while, years even, this is going to keep up, and blood sugar levels can remain normal. However, usually it can’t keep up forever, and even at those elevated levels of insulin are not enough to keep blood sugar in the normal range. So it starts to rise. That’s diabetes.
It probably won’t surprise you to hear that most of my patients have insulin resistance or diabetes. And if you are sitting there thinking, “Phew, that’s not me,” you actually might want to think again, because almost 50% of adult Americans now have diabetes or pre-diabetes. That is almost 120 million of us. But that’s hardly everyone who has issues with insulin. Because as I was saying, people have elevated insulin levels due to insulin resistance for years, even decades, before the diagnosis of even pre-diabetes is made.
Plus, it’s been shown that 16% to 25% of normal-weight adults are also insulin resistant. So, in case you’re keeping track, this is a heck of a lot of us. So, the trouble with insulin resistance is: If it goes up, we are at a great risk for developing type 2 diabetes. But also, insulin makes us hungry, and the food we eat much more likely to be stored as fat. Insulin is our fat storage hormone.
So we can start to see how it’s going to be a problem for diseases like obesity and metabolic issues like diabetes. But what if we traced this problem back to the beginning, and we just didn’t have so much glucose around that insulin needed to deal with? Let’s take a look at how that could be.
Everything you eat is either a carbohydrate, a protein or a fat, and they all have a very different effect on glucose and therefore insulin levels, as you can see on the graph.
So when we eat carbohydrates, our insulin and glucose are going to spike up fast. And with proteins it looks a lot better. But take a look at what happens when we eat fat. Essentially nothing, a flat line. And, this is going to wind up being very important.
So, now I want to translate that graph for you into a real-world situation. I want you to go back and think about the last time you ate an American version of Chinese food. We all know there’s rules associated with this, right? And the first rule is: You’re going to overeat. Because the stop signal doesn’t get sent until you are literally busting at the seams.
Rule number two is: In an hour you’re starving. Why? Well, because the rice in that meal caused glucose and insulin to skyrocket, which triggered hunger, fat storage and cravings. So, if you are insulin resistant to begin with, and your insulin levels are already higher, you really are hungrier all the time. And we have this setup: Eat carbs, your glucose goes up, your insulin goes up, and you have hunger and fat storage.